When it comes to beauty and skin care routines it is hard to acknowledge what parts of it are sustainable and what isn’t. Especially when it comes to trying to do so to help the environment.
A lot of aspects of beauty and skincare unfortunately aren’t great for our lovely planet. With products using a lot of plastic and items such as make up wipes and cotton pads being unrecyclable.
But here at Evolve we want to make it easy for you, our audience, to maintain a green beauty routine. Some of our products here are great for multiple things. Although you think you’re just buying body polish, what you are actually buying is a lip scrub - exfoliator - pre tan - pot of gold.
Why Use Multi-Purpose Products?
Reduce Plastic Waste
Multi-purpose products are a great way to reduce waste and reduce plastic use, especially when it comes to your beauty routines. In 2014 Britain produced 4.9 millions tonnes of plastic waste, as reported by the WWF. Two thirds of that was plastic packaging and only 1.2 millions tonnes of it was actually recycled. Although that report is dated from 2014, the WWF estimates that the situation has only slightly improved, with the UK still perhaps only recycling a third of its waste.
Save Money
Using one product for various things can make your beauty routine a lot more green. You will be buying less products so automatically purchasing less packaging, and you will be spending a lot less money as rather than buying three separate items for different jobs - just buy one that does them all! Who needs all those half empty bottles cluttering your dressing table, or pushed to the back of drawers anyway.
Here at Evolve…
We are helping people to evolve healthier and greener beauty habits with clean, green beauty products designed for everyone, everyday. Our vision is to get our beautiful products into as many people’s hands as possible, we want to be a thought leader on everything green and clean in beauty.
Our Multi-Purpose Products
Like I said before, a few of our products here at Evolve are great for more than one thing. We want to help you on your journey towards greener beauty, so by incorporating some of these lovely products into your routine you can save money and help the planet!
Gentle Cleansing Melt
Our 100% natural Gentle Cleansing Melt is a cleansing balm which cleans your skin and leaves it feeling hydrated and calm. It includes organic Baobab oil to soothe and moisturise your skin. Baobab can also help to improve skin’s elasticity and is full of antioxidants to protect skin from free radicals.
Although our cleansing melt is designed to cleanse skin it’s also great for a number of other things - perhaps being our product with the most purposes.
What Else Can It Do?
- Scalp Treatment - Baobab contains high levels of Vitamin A. Whilst this is great for the skin as it helps to balance oily skin, it's also great for your hair. Vitamin A produces sebum which can help prevent hair breakage. So whilst applying this to your face why not apply it to your scalp as well? Leaving your hair strong and nourished.
- Make Up Remover - This balm is a great makeup remover, even removing waterproof mascara and stubborn liquid lipstick! It is a water free product so it won’t sting sensitive skin and is super gentle.
- Help with bruises and scrapes - Although Baobab is great for nourishing your skin and hair, it can also help new skin cell rejuvenation. This means that it can aid healing of any surface damage such as bruises and scrapes - a great one to have in the bathroom cabinet!
- In Flight Mask - If you tend to travel a lot, or even if you just fancy a bit of a deeper cleanse then you can use it as an in flight mask. It’s thick texture feels luxurious and leaving it on as a mask allows its nourishing oils to sink into the skin even further. You can wash off with water as normal because the natural sugar extracts in the balm turn the melt into a milk when in contact with water.
Daily Defence Moisture Mist
Our Daily Defence Moisture Mist is a facial mist that firms, tones and hydrates the skin. It uses prickly pear elixir to calm and firm skin, moringa extracts to purify the skin, and hyaluronic acid to hydrate the skin.
What Else Can It Do?
- Anti pollution - With its use of moringa extracts, this little spray is great to help protect skin from pollution. We all come into contact with pollution on a daily basis and even more so if you live in a busy city, but we rarely think about the effects it can have on our skin. Dirt particles from pollution can settle deep in your skin’s pores and cause irritation, rashes and breakouts. Moringa extracts help protect the skin against pollution attacks by facilitating the removal of an invisible skin damaging film caused by micro-particles.
- Make Up fixing spray - This mist is a great natural alternative to a makeup setting spray. Throughout the day make up can start to become dry and in need of refreshing. A quick spray of this mist over your makeup can help hydrate the skin and bring your makeup back to looking its best.
- Hot Flushes - If you’re suffering with hot flushes then this will be great for calming down hot and irritated skin. It’s prickly pear extracts are incredibly soothing and you can even keep it in the fridge to really cool your skin.
Lip Treat
Our Lip Treat is a vegan lip balm that contains ingredients such as shea and cocoa butter to help nourish and replenish dry lips. It contains orange essential oils so it smells delicious - just like chocolate orange!
What Else Can It Do?
- Help Dry Patches - This lip balm’s moisturising qualities help hydrate dry patches on the skin, such as knees and elbows. These areas can dry out quickly so popping a little bit of this balm on them will really help - and you can easily keep the little pot in your handbag for moisturising on the go!
Tropical Blossom Body Polish
This is a 100% natural oil based body polish that contains Tahitian monoi, sweet almond oil and organic sugar to buff and moisturise the skin. The organic sugar extracts gently exfoliate the skin leaving it polished and smooth, whilst the coconut monoi has restorative and antioxidant qualities to leave skin nourished. When you use this it’s important to note to always apply directly onto dry skin!
What Else Can It Do?
- Lip Scrub - This body polish doesn’t have to be just for your body. You can use all of its amazing exfoliating and moisturising properties on your lips too! Great to apply before wearing lipstick to give your lips a bit of TLC.
- Pre tan - If you use fake tan then you will know how hard it is to avoid patchy tan on tricky areas such as wrists, ankle, knees and elbows. The addition of sweet almond oil in this body polish will leave skin moisturised and nourished after exfoliation but will ensure that skin is left soft and not tacky, ideal for tanning application.
Skin Saviour Body Oil
The Skin Saviour is a 100% natural body oil created to which has been formulated to help reduce the appearance of scars and stretch marks. It uses organic rosehip oil to enhance skin cell turnover and improve the appearance of scarred skin. The baobab in the oil helps to nourish skin whilst the mandarin essential oil helps to prevent stretch marks.
What Else Can It Do?
- Dry Skin - If you are prone particularly dry skin then this oil can help moisturise and nourish problem areas. Apply directly onto the skin and enjoy the moisturising qualities of the baobab oil.
- Anti Ageing - Both rosehip and baobab oil can help fight the signs of ageing. Baobab is known to improve the skin's elasticity and protects skin from free radicals, helping to prevent signs such as wrinkles. Rosehip oil is also great for anti ageing as it’s high fatty acid content keeps skin nourished and it is rich in bio-retinol which helps promote cellular renewal.
Evolve’s Green Vision
We currently do our best to use the greenest and most sustainable ways to create all of our products, but we are always looking for any ways that we can improve and push ourselves to be our very best.
What Are We Currently Doing?
We know that once a customer has used one of our products, they will be left with an empty container - whether that is one of our bottles or one of our jars. We want to make it as easy as possible for our consumers to recycle any old packaging of ours.
Most of our bottles and jars are made of brown glass, which we source from as close to our eco studio as possible (from Europe not China), to reduce air miles. For products like shampoos, conditioners, body wash and body lotion we use recycled plastic bottles as glass bottles could present a safety hazard if they break. For these we use amber plastic 100% recycled PET bottles. All of our cartons are made from FSC certified Kraft paper. This means that the paper we use for all of our packaging has been harvested in a responsible manner.
Potential Future Solutions
We are constantly thinking of new and improved ways to innovate our products and packaging.
One thing that we want to do in the future is create refill pouches that will enable our lovely customers to purchase full sized products but with a travel cap rather than a pump/spray, which will be easier to recycle. We also want to make refill pouches that will fit all of our products, alongside sample pouches, both of which will be fully compostable.
In order to make more of our product components easily recyclable we want to find black plastic pumps and sprays that can be seen by the scanner and that also do not contain springs. We could also look into finding a compostable material that can be moulded into pumps, sprays and lids and possibly even small bottles to improve recyclability.
How Do We Make Our Products?
Not only do we try and make our packaging as sustainable as we possibly can, we also focus a lot on the ingredients within our products. The way we make our products is incredibly important. We know that customers trust us to do the right thing and we try to repay this trust by being incredibly careful in how we source, manufacture and package our products in every tiny detail. We make our products in small batches by hand and we make sure that every product that leaves our eco studio is of the highest quality.
What Are We Currently Doing?
We make sure that every single one of our products is over 99% natural, and we are completely transparent about the percentages of both natural and organic ingredients in all of our products. We avoid any ingredient that may be questionable in line with the recognised COSMOS organic standard.
All of our products are also completely vegan, as we use no animal derived or by product such as beeswax or milk. We also do not conduct any animal testing on products or ingredients.
What Issues Are We Currently Working On?
All new ingredients being used will be comprehensively audited going forward so that we can make sure they meet our standards. We did conduct a palm oil audit as part of our ingredients audit and found that some of our ingredients do contain palm oil which is sustainably sourced.
What Are We Planning On Doing Next?
This year we are planning to gain more certifications to make our brand even more recognisable for its amazing qualities such as being vegan and cruelty free.
We aim to formulate all of our products to COSMOS certified organic standards and we’re also in the process of obtaining a certification from ECOCERT. We are also currently conducting a cruelty free audit and will be obtaining a certification from Leaping Bunny this year.
Another audit that we are currently conducting is a vegan audit and will be obtaining a vegan society certification this year.
On top of all of these we are also working on ISO 9001 and GWP quality certification.
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